Weed Whacker

Have you tried the pattern Weed Whacker by Bonnie Hunter? I love how this pattern comes together and it's a great way to use up scraps. I can call most of these greens gone from my stash! This was started (ahem...) several years ago at a get-away taught by Tina over at Seaside Stitches. Hers was done up in beautiful multi-colored scraps, but I went for a similar-colored look. Today I pieced the back and pin basted so I can get quilting. Gotta love crawling all over the floor and in the humidity, the quilt top was sticking to me knees and lifting every time I moved.

The bonus pieces cut off each little group were used to make the pieced border. Scrap quilts always tell a story - there are pieces of my mother's fabric, some from a friend, pieces left from quilts I've given others. It's always fun to just look at the bits.



I moved all the furniture in my dining room as this quilt is HUGE. My dog zonked out in the heat and humidity and didn't make a move to walk on the quilt. The cat, however, has a mind of her own, but gracefully skirted the quilt edges.



And a bonus picture. My youngest son is working at the Weekapaug Inn in Westerly (just ranked #5 in the US for inns and lodges) and part of his job is taking people out on a salt pond and showing them how to dig clams. He brought me these beautiful quahogs (an Indian word for hardshell clam) for an appetizer last night. They look tiny, but they are all legal! The sugar package and mess is from chocolate frosting he was making for a cake. He's quite the chef.

Happy 4th of July tomorrow!

Easy Street - Part IV

It's been a quiet day here at my house in Rhode Island. My husband and youngest DS are off skiing and I stayed home to work on some projects and finish decorating for Christmas. We had such sad news yesterday about the shooting of 20 first graders and their teachers that I just needed time to quietly sew while listening to public radio. It's inconceivable that someone could kill that many innocents like that. Thursday night I attended a choral presentation by our lower school chorus where 2nd through 5th graders sang holiday music. They are beautiful children, full of enthusiasm, energy and excitement. I keep picturing those happy children while thinking of those who will never have the same chance to sing for their parents. With sadness, but relieved to have something to do, I finished part IV of Easy Street, Bonnie Hunter's mystery.

Thank you Bonnie, for helping to calm my mind.

Easy Street, Part III

 All done with my 64 pieces in the latest installment of Bonnie Hunter's Mystery: Easy Street. Each clue is so much fun to complete, and not as time consuming as the string piecing in Orca Bay or Roll, Roll, Cotton Boll. Thank you, Bonnie, for keeping it easy this year.

I had all these grand plans to use fat quarters, but found as the clues keep coming my strip drawers can provide much of the needed colors. 

A possible arrangement? 

 This block I've blown up too much so it's pixelated, but can you see the teal millenium fabric? Tina from Seaside Stitches gave out half yards of this at our last Habitat for Humanity quilt-making workshop in November. Yes, it will date the quilt (literally), but this is what scrap quilts are all about.

Hope we get to play with the greens next week!

Easy Street, Part 2 (and 1)

It's been a while since I posted - life just gets in the way sometimes!

My oldest came home from college for 10 days.

Here the boys are along with our Irish Setter. This photo was taken just before Thanksgiving.

Lately though I've been in the Quilt Cave, as my youngest DS calls it. In my attic, I have a room all to myself, and I can't hear anything happening in the rest of the house. I put on NPR, and sew away happily. Several projects are on the go, including Bonnie Hunter's mystery quilt, Easy Street. You've probably seen lots of blog posts about how quilters are keeping up.

Part one of Easy Street. I went with some off-whites with black as well as pure black and white. It's all about using up stash! In this photo, the twosies still need to be paired up to make a 4-patch.

Then came the  128 flying geese.  I love how they came out and almost every one is perfect using Bonnie's technique with the EZ Angle rulers. Still need to snip the dog ears.

Last night I had trouble sleeping, and part of the problem was the division problems I was doing in my head. I kept thinking of common multiples for the pieces already done on Easy Street. Can you tell I'm a math teacher? Perhaps our blocks will be similar to this? 

Next step is published on Friday, and I've got all this from the stash waiting to be used. I stuck with the recommended colors and dug deep in my bins.

See you next week!

Dwayne's quilt - after a fire.

My husband is a volunteer firefighter who trains weekly, attends classes and goes out at all hours of the night to try and save people's homes. Most fire calls are false alarms - the carbon monoxide detector is going off for no reason (did you know you should vacuum the dust out periodically?), or someone burned some food, or an old person leaned on the alarm at the nursing home. Sometimes though - maybe once or twice a year - there's a large and devastating fire. My town had one last week where three women and one child lost everything from three apartments, probably from someone smoking on the porch. Anyway, one of our firefighters lost all of his belongings in a apartment building fire a few weeks ago. A neighbor was smoking in bed, fell asleep, and destroyed the belongings of many people. For the record - I HATE SMOKING - not only because fires can start, but because of the butts people throw all over the road that end up in our streams and ocean, and because of all the resulting cancers and health issues. Really, what is good about smoking? Enough of that rant.

Dwayne's belongings were ruined from smoke and water damage. This quilt, another Bonnie Hunter (Fourth of July) was already in progress, but I finished it for Dwayne's new apartment.

Isn't this an easy pattern? Using Bonnie's scrap system, I pulled out my blue and red 3 1/2" squares and added the cream background from stash.

The stars were fun to quilt using variegated thread. I used navy on the back and you can see some thread points which didn't really pop through, but are still visible in the cream.

Soon the sparkly millennium fabric will be gone! It's not getting any younger in my stash!

The stars on the back and front border were gifted from my step-mother. The selvedge says 1985, but this is still being made and I saw it in my LQS last week. The fabric on the left is now gone!

The pinwheels are made from the leftover triangles cut off from piecing the front.

This should keep Dwayne warm.

Star Struck for a baby boy

It's been a busy summer of finishing up tops and creating new quilts. I keep trying to use stash before buying anything new and this baby quilt is almost completely from stash. It's another Bonnie Hunter pattern - Star Struck - check out Quiltville.com for the pattern. I love orange and blue together and hope it will work for a boy, who is due next month.

I've been using Bonnie's scrap system for a while, so just had to pull out strips and start cutting. 

 In the borders I tried pebble quilting, also known as bubble quilting, which was easy, but uses a ton of thread. Still working on keeping my stitch length even and smaller. The orange border was purchased new for this quilt. Can you see the tiny green and blue border with gold stars? It was part of a fat quarter.

The backing was given to me and probably has a bit of polyester in it, but it has the colors that are supposed to appeal to new babies.

 This is such an easy pattern that can be made in any size. Give it a try!

Baby Quilt for Scarlet!

Scarlet Justine was born a couple days ago to one of my cousins. As the oldest of all the cousins, I've got boys heading off to college while my young cousins are still having babies. To keep up with the babies, I like to have a supply of boy and girl quilts ready to go, especially since some new mamas want to be surprised with the sex.


Bonnie Hunter came to my guild recently and taught a class using odd sized strings and strips - but I had just finished her mystery quilt and had few strings left! Isn't that a sad problem? So, I just pulled from the pre-cut 2 1/2" drawer for greens and creams and made up this rail-fence style.

Bonnie's idea was to use the leftover pieced strips and cut the border out of them. I think it worked out great. The strips are all leftovers from projects, or culled from donation tables at get-aways, or won at our guild's monthly ways and means table. There's some oldies in there such as a few calicos and some bug fabrics from when I first started quilting!

 On the back, I put a piece of pink flannel that I inherited from my Mom's stash many years ago.

The outer border has free-form daisies, the inner polka-dot border has free-form leaves and the main body of the quilt is cross-hatched. Look at those two green calicos! Yikes - I'm glad to see them go.